The new unit of measurement

One day we went to visit the huge storm surge barrier protecting Rotterdam’s harbor. The Maeslantkering. An gigantic engineering construction that is included in the massive project of the Delta Works, declared as one of the new Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineering. Looking at that incredible infrastructure made all of us pretty impressed, some of us were absolutely excited. In this last group was located our beloved Le Manh Hung. The little Vietnamese was literally saturated of enthusiasm, we could see him admiring this masterpiece with devotion and respect.

At a certain point of our visit, I took this picture:

Immediately I noticed there was something particular…Something related to dimensions, to vanishing point, to Golden Rations..I don’t know..One thing was sure: Hung was in the picture.

But then, I realized. Let’s analyse the picture in from a critical point of view:

As we can notice from the picture above, Hung fits perfectly the length of a corresponding arc of a unit circle. And this is incredible because HE can be used to measure the height of the structure on the left. So if we define one HUNG as depicted above, we can estimate that the arm of Maeslantkering is more or less 4 HUNG in height. The versatility of the HUNG is easily derived in other field of engineering applications: for surfaces we can apply a comfortable HUNG², while the HUNG³ is perfect for volume estimations. Yet, the adaptability of such a new concept finds pertinence even in mass measurement: an elephant weights 100 HUNG-Weight (or 1 HectoHUNG-Weight). Recent studies are investigating the implementation of HUNG-Time to measure the time needed to write scientific papers. But the most common application is in flux measures: the use of CUBIC-HUNG per second is thought to be the best way to deal either with big and small numbers of hydrologic quantities.